Determination of a device's location is useful in supporting a wide variety of location based services and/or applications. To facilitate use of such services and applications it is desirable that a device be able to determine its location with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
While global positioning system (GPS) devices may be used for location determination, in many locations, e.g., inside buildings, outside between large buildings, and in other locations where reception of satellite transmitted GPS signals is difficult, GPS may not be a viable location determination mechanism.
The measurement of signals from access points positioned at fixed known locations may be used in some systems as a basis for determining location. Unfortunately, fixed access points may not be located in enough locations to be used reliably for location determination purposes at all times.
While it is useful for a device to know its location reliably at various points in time, e.g., for map based navigation applications, for social applications it is often useful to know the location of peer devices with which a user of a device may want to interact, e.g., for one or more social reasons.
In view of the above discussion, it should be appreciated that there is a need for improved location determination methods which could be used to determine a device's location even when GPS signals may not be received. In addition, while not necessary or used for all embodiments, it would be desirable if location determination methods could provide information on the location of other wireless devices, e.g., peer devices, in addition to the location of the device